A data center is provided as a facility in which a large number of hardware including servers and communication devices are integrally located and operated. Some data centers are located as part of an existing building. Cloud computing is being widespread these days, and the scale of the data center is increasing. Therefore, further power saving is desired in a large-scale data center.
A container-type data center with low initial investment cost is proposed for constructing such a large-scale data center. The container-type data center is beginning to rapidly spread because this data center is a portable data center that is easily expandable according to the scale of an entire data center and is a form effective in implementation of power saving by reducing total power consumption.
Devices to be installed in the container-type data center are electronic computers such as network devices, storage devices, and servers. Some of the devices placed in the data center have components that produce heat such as a Central Processing Unit (CPU) as a computer device and a memory as a storage device. When the temperature of these components increases, air conditioning is used to reduce the temperature of the components, which also reduces the temperature inside the container.
There is a chiller-used air conditioning system as one of air conditioning systems for the container-type data center. When the air conditioning system is used, however, electric power is used to cool down the air. Because of this, the air conditioning system can be considered that the power consumption is increased. Therefore, attention is focused on an outside air cooling system in terms of power saving for air conditioning. Particularly, one of air conditioning systems effective in power saving is a direct outside air system that takes in outside air to the container-type data center and uses the outside air to cool down the components such as CPU that have produced heat and the temperature inside the container.
As the direct outside air system, a conventional technology is proposed in which a large-scale air conditioning fan fixed to the container is used to take in air from the outside to the container and a server uses a fan provided in its own to take in the air to a housing and cool down a heat-producing component and the like (e.g., see Product Catalogue of SGI® Ice Cube® Air: SGI Japan, Ltd.). In this conventional technology, a plurality of air conditioning fans that generate an air volume sufficient enough to cool down the server are provided in consideration of redundancy.
As the air conditioning system of the data center, a conventional technology is proposed in which an air volume of a floor fan is controlled from an operation rate of a server (e.g., see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2011-226737). A conventional technology is also proposed in which groups of a plurality of servers in a data center are separated by blocks and air conditioning is performed on the blocks (e.g., see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2012-048549). Furthermore, a conventional technology is proposed in which rotation of a fan in a container is controlled according to a temperature in the container (e.g., see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2012-038100).
A rotation speed of an internal server fan in a data center is controlled to be appropriate for cooling based on its internal temperature and a temperature of heat-producing components, and the like. In the container-type data center, on the other hand, wind is sent toward a server also by a fan provided in the container. Because of this, a cooling effect due to the fan provided in the container can also lower the temperature of the heat-producing components and the like. Therefore, in consideration of both the cooling effect of the fan provided in the container and the cooling effect of the internal server fan, it is desirable to determine each rotation speed of the fans. However, in the conventional air conditioning systems, the internal server fan and the fans provided in the container independently operate, and therefore it is difficult to perform effective cooling, which makes it difficult to suppress power consumption.
In one aspect of the container-type data center, the air-conditioning control program, and the air-conditioning control method disclosed in the present application, a container includes an electronic device. A first fan takes in outside air to the container and sends the taken-in outside air to the electronic device. A second fan is built into the electronic device and cools down the inside of the electronic device. A control unit controls a rotation speed of the first fan based on a rotation speed of the second fan.